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It was in a dusty corner of his high school library in Malaysia’s central town of Seremban that Abdul Nazir Harith Fadzilah discovered the joy of reading, devouring the classics of Malay literature that his peers had forsaken in favour of tomes on business and finance.
“I never thought I would enjoy this kind of literature,” Nazir recalls, sitting on a low stool in Tintabudi, the bookshop in Kuala Lumpur he founded two years ago, the bluesy sound of Tuareg band Tinariwen playing softly in the background. “I hadn’t realised there was so much happening in the world.”
Later, as an engineering student in Melbourne, Nazir plunged himself into the Australian city’s literary culture, wandering around second-hand and independent bookshops, and buying anything that caught his eye. At the end of each academic year, he would stagger home to Malaysia with his latest finds — works on philosophy, the humanities, history. “I’d developed a habit,” he says with understatement. By the end of the course, Nazir had accumulated 1,000 books.
When it came time to graduate, engineering was far from Nazir’s mind. He dreamed instead of a bookshop, one that would stock the sort of books other Malaysian stores didn’t, foster debate and open minds, much as the books in the school library had done for him. He came up with the name, a play on two Malay words — tinta meaning ink, and budi, the spirit of human goodness — to reflect that mission and set up shop in Ipoh, his hometown, in 2016.
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